


One out of Two Ain't Bad

by Splat_Dragon



Series: Prompts from TheDoodleNoodle_WA [1]
Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: "The Apple Doesn't Fall Far From The Tree", APPARENTLY HE'S 39??, Animal Death, Character Study, Drabble, Micah never had a chance, Placeholder Name: Clowns Don't Bounce, from Victorious, they don't
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:40:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28091040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Splat_Dragon/pseuds/Splat_Dragon
Summary: To be quite honest, Micah never really had a chance.
Series: Prompts from TheDoodleNoodle_WA [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2057964
Kudos: 8





	One out of Two Ain't Bad

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Micah Bell - "The Apple Doesn't Fall Far From The Tree"

Contrary to popular belief, Micah _did_ have feelings.

He just… wasn’t too good at expressing them. He’d been taught when he was young, and taught well, that Bells are made of steel. They don’t cry, they don’t hug, they don’t say ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘You okay?’

They lie, they cheat, they steal. It’s all he’d known - he’d been dragged into cons by his father from the moment he could walk; after all, what was better than a doe eyed, blond hair blue eyed little boy to increase your credulity? “Please sir, we’re lost and my boys are just so thirsty.”

Amos had done his best to shield him from it. _‘It’s just a game!’_ he’d say as he yanked Micah out of the way of a bullet, _‘They’re ‘it’, and if they get you you lose!’_ and Micah had always wanted to win, what was the point of doing anything if you didn’t do your best after all? and so he always did well. Sure, sometimes he got ‘tagged’, and it hurt like the devil, but Amos said so long as he kept on his feet then he wasn’t ‘it’ so it was fine.

  
  


Amos wasn’t much older than him, but you’d never know it.

His pa had always had his head in the clouds — “This job boys, it’ll be it! We’ll be sittin’ fat ‘n’ pretty, just you see!” — and so it had fallen to Amos to keep him from dying. To keep him fed - to teach him to keep himself fed, to put a varmint rifle in his hand and to teach him to butcher and cook a deer. It had been his pa who put a proper rifle in his hand, who’d taught him to dead-draw a man in the head from hundred yards, how to throw your weight around and threaten a man into giving you his life savings and snivel until a man thought you were his right hand man only for you to rob him blind.

Amos had taught him to pluck apples from trees, to siphon gold dust from a river, to sweet talk a horse until it charged a cougar if you asked.

  
  


Amos had tried, really, he had.

His brother had grown disillusioned young. Had squirreled away money, snuck out and done jobs beneath their pa’s nose, and one day he’d woke up and Amos had been gone.

And maybe that had cemented his fate.

His pa had been furious. Had had to handle his young son, make sure he had food in his stomach and water in his throat, ammunition in his gun and something antiseptic on his wounds.

And without Amos to watch his back, he’d had to bring young Micah on the jobs that, until then, he’d been sheltered from. See things that would haunt him for the rest of his life, the deer-like final squeals of men with their throats slit, women shrieking as their men were cut down in front of them. Children younger even than him shot mercilessly to ‘shut [them] the fuck up!’, corpses strung up as a reminder of what his pa would do if they went to the law.

He grew. Blood and screams and corpses filled his days and haunted his nights, and he slept less and less. Micah taught himself to wield two guns, and for the first time his pa looked at him with something other than disdain in his eyes.

For his sixteenth birthday, his pa stole a pair of revolvers that matched his own.

The day of his seventeenth birthday, he slit the throats of a man and his wife, Roscoe and Jean Briggs, and strung up their bodies in a barn as his father worked their fields.

  
  


Twenty two years later, a dog named Cain bit him.

He slit its throat and strung its body up in a cave.


End file.
